Bryan Cantrill talks porting code, but really this sounds applicable to any creative endeavor:

it is very difficult to have forward visibility as to progress. That is, you can feel deceptively close to your goal (only to discover some major piece that needs to be rethought) — and you can also be deceptively far (what feels like smoldering wreckage is sometimes but a single fix away from functional software).

Also: reminds me of golf. One moment I’m cursing “I hate this stupid game”. Then I get a good shot, all is forgiven, and I setup a tee time for next week.

Bryan Cantril:

LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone’s) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage. Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better .

That’s a good answer for the next job interview.

“What’s your best attribute?”

“That I’m lazy”

To be human is to want something simple because simple is the only thing intelligible to our limited intellectual and temporal capacities.

The best engineering is always borne of constraints, and the constraint of our time places limits on the cognitive load of the system that we’re willing to accept.